Third Party & Independents Archives

Measles are increasing in part because people are starting to be more careful about how many innoculations their children get. The greatest danger with TB is from “legal” immigrants from Russia, who have received treatment for the disease, but did not take the full course of antibiotics, and now carry a more virulent strain.
The government is doing a poor job of protecting us on many fronts. The agencies that have already been set up to do these things, simply are not doing their jobs, including the FBI, FCC, and FDA, and those are just a few in the Fs. Why should we expect anything better from the border patrol? Let’s bring the army and the private contractors back from Iraq, and station them where we actually need them, and make those lazy Texans pay for it.

ohrealy, what an absurd counterpoint. Illegal immigration poses no health risks, it is the Legal immigrants and American parents who are responsible for communicable disease increases. Preposterous!

Especially in light of the fact two known facts about illegal immigrants, the TB rate in their countries of origin are 5 to 20% higher than in the U.S. and many illegal immigrants especially from Central America, have not had the vaccinations required of legal immigrants.

The CDC btw, refutes your postulation about legal immigrants. Legal immigrants testing positive for TB are not admitted to the U.S. Of course no such check can be done on illegal immigrants.

One more thing, which is cheaper for me as a 5 acre landowner, hire 24 hour guards every 200’ of boundary to my land, or keep 2 surveillance dogs and fence the area with signs: Beware of Dogs?

Manpower is perpetually expensive. Barriers incur a one time major expense and small maintenance costs thereafter. I spent about $800 to fence my 5 acres. That was 11 years ago. I have made one repair to a corner torn down by kids for a cost of $22 in wire materials and 2 hours of my time.

The barrier fencing stops 90% of the illegal traffic. The manpower and other surveillance equipment is required for the other 10%. The border barrier pays for itself as it is built by deterring 90% of the traffic.

The border barrier also drives way up the cost of coming across the border, via coyote’ services. Well beyond affordability for that 90% who are deterred by having to travel hundreds of more miles and live on the other side of the border awaiting their turn to come through some tunnel or breached area of the barrier that will be discovered and closed in days if not weeks.

Finding tunnels is not easy. Finding flows of people exiting them is. Hence, the border barrier vastly increases the efficiency of border patrol in detecting where crossing points because the border barrier invariable creates streams of people like water from hole in a dike, and makes tracing the flow back to the hole, remarkably easy.

Driving the cost of illegal immigration way up is the effective way of deterring it, because it negates dollar for dollar the benefit of coming here to work for low American wages.

Little girls and mothers are being raped and sold for sex at an alarming rate as the cost of getting across the border. Anything we can do to drop the rate of those trying to cross by 90% will also cut the rapes and sexual abuse of girls and women by a commensurate percentage.

The arguments for the border barrier and the evidence of their performance, is stacking up and becoming irrefutable. Last I heard there were 450 miles, and 700 miles constitutes the first installment of a Southern Border barrier. And everywhere along the completed areas, the rate of flow of illegal has dropped precipitously.

Like water however, it will flow around obstacles to the closest available opening. But as those openings become fewer and fewer, finding them for the Border Patrol becomes vastly easier, and the cost of going through them for illegal immigrants becomes prohibitive for the majority, who would otherwise have been able to afford to come here if the barriers were not there.

David

I will admit to not being real sharp on border security issues. I have heard a lot of varied speculation on the subject but it just seems so vast and complicated that I fear there will never be any good compromise on the issue. I am wondering if all that complication is a product of convenience in an effort to mask the issue. On top of that I don’t think those that can do anything about it really want to. Business people crave the cheap labor and as you say the dems crave the votes.

To be honest I find the idea of vast fences offensive and running opposite our perceptions of freedom and liberty for all. Fencing ourselves off from our neighbors seems very impersonal and in direct contradiction to the ideologies this country was founded on. As you can probably tell I am struggling with finding a compromise between offending our neighbors and pursuing practical issues of enforcing the law. This is where I get totally confused. I can not understand why we do not enforce current law. I like the e-verify concept and see no problem with enforcing it. But it seems to me if we were to crack down on employers with enforcement of current laws we should be able to curtail the problem. Isn’t the unwillingness by officials to actually enforce current law the main obstacle to putting all this in perspective? If employers did not break the law by hiring illegals there would be no incentive for them to enter illegally. Why are employers not being prosecuted for breaking the law?

I could understand a worker program based on the concept that they will be hired only after all American assets have first been utilized.

RickIl, there is a famous saying about fences. They make amicable neighbors who respect each other’s boundaries.

Building a barrier against illegal immigration in no way hampers legal immigration to meet whatever needs our country has for immigration. We have had borders on our East and West coasts from the very beginning, with ports of entry through which legal approved immigrants may pass after being inocculated, documented, and provided the requirements to be met in order to become productive contributing law abiding citizens.

I grant you, an ocean is a far more pleasant sight than a 16 foot barrier of concrete, metal panels, or wire. But then landfills are no pretty sight either but they are absolutely necessary for the health and well being of our nation’s people. Is the sight of headlines of mass rapes of girls and women each year on the border as the price of crossing over or the incursion of drug cartels exchanging fire with our Border Patrol and landowners any prettier a sight than a barrier which prevents these things from happening on a regular basis?

As everyone knows in Washington D.C., truly enforcing hiring laws for legal employers will only expand the market for illegal jobs and the underground economy. Menendez is an Hispanic who is catering to that constituency instead of the taxpaying citizens of this nation who pay his federal Senatorial salary and benefits.

His voting record demonstrates his desire for wide open immigration from all countries to our South. I don’t doubt he truly believes what he says that enforcing E-verify will lead to the most massive deportation of humanity in history. Of course, that would be wrong as the Holocaust will forever hold that record.

But, so very much of the health and well being for America’s and our children’s future depends upon our having control of our borders, from control of communicable diseases, to control of American wages and the balance between the labor pool availability and employer needs. And let’s not forget national security. Our intelligence community has already made public that Hezbolloah has come into the U.S. over our Southern Border from S. America. They aren’t here to vacation from Brazil.

Much in our future depends upon our protecting our sovereignty and borders and tightly regulating and controlling the immigration into this country so that our country’s future is enhanced by immigration, not destroyed by it. The story of Chinese spies in America has surfaced many times now over the last 24 months. We are losing control of the whole immigration policy and issue, and their will be a price to be paid for such lack of due diligence just as 9/11 was the price for lack of due diligence by our salaried employees in Washington D.C.

We must not allow our government to fail us, the people again, because they are too engrossed in partisan politics to pay attention to the growing myriad of challenges and threats to our children’s and nation’s future. The immigration is but one of many threats our government is refusing to address, like entitlement deficits, national debt rapidly approaching the 10 trillion dollar mark, and a trade deficit which T. Boone Pickens rightly points out will constitute the greatest export of American wealth and treasure in the history of our nation, impoverishing generations to follow.

I am supporting Obama. It would be political suicide for him to vow to get control of our borders in this campaign. But, he has said and promised that he will dedicate his presidency to forcing partisan politics out of the way to solve the open the path to solving the challenges that face our nation’s future.

And illegal immigration, now 20 million strong, is one of those challenges. He will have to address our open borders in his first 4 years, if he is to get my vote again in 2012. I suspect I will not be the only voter resolving that for 2012 either.

If there is a more effective, cheaper, and more humane solution to halting illegal immigration, I will be all for it. But, to date, the evidence demonstrates a border barrier meets those criteria better than any other single option, and combined with other efforts, illegal immigration can be virtually stopped in a few short years. Hopefully in time to avert a catastrophe that should have been prevented by enforcing our laws decades ago.

I am with you on legal seasonal and migrant workers, who are vaccinated, documented, and therefore treated humanely as a result of being on legal payrolls. But, the only way that is going to become the norm, is if we first halt the illegal immigration coming across undocumented, unvaccinated, without ID or background checks, and who are vulnerable to all manner if human rights violations by those who would and do exploit their illegal status in this country. The horror stories are growing, but, there is no market for them, because they haven’t affected middle class suburbia, yet.

David, I don’t see how truly enforcing hiring laws will increase the illegal job market. Are you saying that it would be similar to prohibition or the war on drugs? Where enforcing laws doesn’t affect demand it just drives supply underground. These workers are already underground. I think that while this is true of a commodity that people are different, they are harder to hide.

I have always thought if we put the whole Walton family (Wal-Mart) in jail and a few other major offenders that would send a message that we were serious. Their greed has created this problem and they should pay for it.

We need a solution to this problem for the health of the nation as you point out, the wages of our workers, and the security of our country. A nation that can’t control it’s borders isn’t a nation. Not sure if a big fence will be effective - there are always ways around a physical barrier. Deporting 20 million people isn’t practical either. ohreally’s suggestion to use the mercenaries (or “contractors” as the Bush Admin calls them) from Iraq is a really bad idea. They have not done us proud over there and no reason to believe they won’t indiscriminately shoot people here too. Privatization of the military is among the worst ideas W & co. have come up with in their very long list of bad ideas and policies. While we may face worse problems as a country none seem harder to solve in a humane way.

David (and others)—

Much to address here, but I’ll start with Sen. Menendez. It’s sort of a corollary to Occam’s razor that when there are multiple reasons why a politician would do something, political expediency tends to trump principle. So don’t mistake me as giving him much credit, as I have no doubt that his stand against E-Verify has everything to do with creating a new constituency and nothing do to with the numerous flaws in the program itself.

Regardless, E-Verify (and anything else you’d want to propose in a similar vein) is doomed from the start, and should be opposed. Why? I’ll name two big reasons.

1) The record system used in E-Verify’s pilot program (conveniently called Basic Pilot) has an error rate of about 4.1% according to the Social Security information. That means that through no fault of their own, 4% of newly hired workers will be thrown into the bureaucratic morass to get their records fixed. A paper earlier this year from Jim Harper of the Cato Institute stated that this number expanded nationwide would mean an average 11,000 “tentative nonconfirmations” (the term for a records mismatch) a day, every day Monday-Friday in the country.

2) In a similar vein, this program instituted nationwide would only serve to increase Americans’ risk of identity theft, as biographical information, particularly SSN, will become more valuable for people seeking to work in the US illegally. This would lead to an even higher rate of false “tentative nonconfirmations” than the original estimate would suggest. Any sort of national ID system—and make no mistake, that’s what E-Verify is, indirectly—creates incentives for identity thieves, who will game the system to the detriment of more innocent people.

As far as the second portion of the discussion, regarding medical scares: it has been my experience that much of these types of statements are simply that, frightening anecdotes designed to inflame anti-immigration sentiment, with very little evidence in support. Nonetheless, if someone were really concerned about disease with respect to illegal immigration, the solution is not to build fences, but to design a system that properly meets the demonstrated demand for labor currently done by illegal workers.

Under the present system, the amount of available spaces allotted for unskilled workers is vastly less than the number of jobs these workers would fill—thus, people will come over unsanctioned to take the unfilled positions. Greatly expanding the legal channels for people to come to this country to work will accomplish many commendable goals, whether it be allowing for disease screening, or keeping simple working people from having to deal with exorbitant fees from career criminals to sneak them across the border.

I know that libertarian positions on immigration are not terribly popular in most pockets of political discourse, but E-Verify would be an unworkable, expensive disaster for tens of millions of people, and come with the inevitable costs of any national ID system.

tcsned said: “David, I don’t see how truly enforcing hiring laws will increase the illegal job market”

I don’t believe I ever suggested it would increase the illegal job market. Reread what I said, I said it would drive some of the illegal labor employed by above ground tax paying and reporting business to underground, non reporting and non tax paying employers. Where labor seeks employment, the underground economy is always available and usually willing to accommodate.

The point being, enforcing laws on above ground businesses regarding hiring illegals, will not remove the inventive or opportunities for illegals to still be employed in America. It will make those illegal jobs more competitive amongst illegals, and therefore expand the exploitation of illegal labor and lower their wages, but, there enforcing the laws regarding employment, will not resolve the entire fundamental root of problem, a higher standard of living and opportunity in the U.S. than in illegals home countries.

One need only look at the inner cities in America where jobs have dried up to see how this underground economy kicks into high gear with drugs, gambling, prostitution, porn, scams, identity theft rings, turf gangs, stolen goods recycling organizations, and the list goes on and on.

tcsned said: “Not sure if a big fence will be effective - there are always ways around a physical barrier.”

It will be partially effective for this one simple reason. Those other ways around the fence, under it, etc. become dramatically more expensive. Supply and demand math kicks in and prevents large numbers of those wanting to come over form being able to afford to come over.

The fence, as I said earlier on, increases Border Patrol effectiveness in interdiction and deportation at the border, driving the cost to benefit ratio of even trying to come over up very much higher. That effectiveness is increased because our Border Patrol is not spread out along 2 thousand miles of border but, concentrated and focused on people streams from South of the Border which lead them directly back to the tunnel, or boats, or other breach or circumvention of the fence. Very much like inspecting a dam for a leak. You don’t need to spend much time or any resources scanning dry areas of the dam, you look for the one or several wet areas and follow the wet back to the crack and plug the leak. The fence makes Border Patrol vastly more efficient, less costly, and most important, effective in interdiction and deportation at the border.

By driving up the cost of coming over, a large amount of the current traffic dries up and never tries, since they don’t have the resources to cross over when the border barrier elevates the cost of trying to breach it or go around it by sea, for example. Radar over open water is a very highly effective spotting tool for our Coast Guard in detecting mass illegal immigration by sea.

Matt Tyler, you raise good points about the weaknesses and deficiencies in the Pilot E-Verify system. The obvious retort however, is that they will be corrected and eliminated with use.

As for the health risks, your comment does not seem to reflect any time spent reading literature from the Centers for Disease Control around the globe, including our own. Failures in CDC’s overseas due to uncontrolled and unchecked immigration from impoverished countries do, and have created, serious public health problems. Not all of them here, Yet!

This is a very complicated business and gets even moreso with the advent of global warming climate changes which create new and unanticipated disease prone areas and diseases. One cannot ignore the basic premise of every fiction movie about epidemics, which is that, the greater the extent of unknown persons coming in and out of a nation with no health records dramatically increases the obstacles for a CDC isolating the source and preventing the spread.

This has been proven true with HIV for 10 years after it public alarm bells began ringing, and is proving true here with Hepatitus rates soaring along Southern Border states like Texas, Arizona and California threatening school populations and creating a severe shortage of school nurses.

I think it would be helpful if you Googled Center for Disease Control and illegal immigration and read some of the myriad papers and research on this issue. It is a lot larger challenge than the general public has been informed of.

David -

One note - it’s not the prevalence of any disease that’s causing a shortage of school nurses. It’s the fact that school nurses get paid a lot less than a nurse at a hospital.

For instance, a licensed nurse here in Washington state can get a $5K bonus just for signing up at a nursing home and still get paid a higher salary than a school nurse. Not only that, but the school nurse faces a greater liability and attendant legal troubles - not to mention parents irate about her actions or lack thereof.

We work closely with the school nurses, and I have to admit that a lot of times the reason why a nurse working at the school is because the hospital or other facility didn’t think much of her work….

David -

One note - it’s not the prevalence of any disease that’s causing a shortage of school nurses. It’s the fact that school nurses get paid a lot less than a nurse at a hospital.

For instance, a licensed nurse here in Washington state can get a $5K bonus just for signing up at a nursing home and still get paid a higher salary than a school nurse. Not only that, but the school nurse faces a greater liability, a greater chance of losing her license.

Also, a lot of times, the reason a nurse is working at a school is because the higher-paying hospital or facility doesn’t think much of her work.

So if you want a good-paying job that has the best job security in the country (even better than the military), become a nurse.

Glenn, all true. But, the demand for school nurses is rising nonetheless, appreciably so along border states, because the need is great.

This is one of the reasons I want a Democrat vs. a Republican in the White House. Our educational system is floundering and Republicans tend to view education as an individual merit exercise, rather than the holistic environment with large numbers of variables influencing whether learning actually takes place or not. Democrats get this! Republicans like McCain view education as minor compared wars, economy, and jobs. Even though our education underwrites or undermines success of efforts in wars, economy, and jobs.

Besides our Constitution, there is no more fundamental foundation to America culture and quality of life than our educational system. Republicans don’t get this. McCain does not get this, as his priorities on the campaign trail demonstrate. According to McCain, the only education one needs to be successful is 5 years of torture in Hanoi Hilton without a table.

David - thanks for the explanation!

DRRemer, “absurd counterpoint”, you don’t even have it right on TB. Russia, India, and The Philippines are the areas of concern, in that order. You’re too Texas-centric.

“there is a famous saying about fences. They make amicable neighbors who respect each other’s boundaries. ”
“Good fences make good neighbors” was originally intended to be ironic, until the readers of Paranoia magazine decided that it was a good motto.

Mending Wall - a poem by Robert Frost

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘.Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

It’s the fact that school nurses get paid a lot less than a nurse at a hospital.

Don’t worry, once the government takes over healing (or not healing) our bodies like they did being able to put whever they wanted into our children’s minds to help them keep power, their salaries should start to equal out…

And there is (and will be more of) a shortage of hospital nurses too. Soon there won’t be enough, people will have to be ‘drafted’ into providing that service.

Such fun times we live in.

Rhinehold, to live in fear of any change as doomsday because imperfect people failed good intentions in the past, is a very heavy burden to carry in life. Give hope a chance for a change, and work to make that hope a reality.

It’s easier, and vastly more productive than fighting change every inch of the way out of fear.

ohrealy, is this density in your comment intentional. Those countries for the most part send us legal immigrants who are screened for TB. Ergo, the greater threat is with illegal immigrants who are not tested for TB.

Debating with you is like debating a tree. Sorry, my error, a tree at least yields to the wind if not sound logic and fact.

googlumpus, from the poem: “‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.”

But there are finite resources to this nation and an infinite demand for them. Frost was a poet, not an economist. The poem is apropos’ in this regard, there are no cows we are trying to separate. But, also note in the poem, that the neighbors met, conversed, worked together, and responded as good neighbors in mending their common wall. The wall did contribute to their being neighborly.

It is right there in the poem. The wall gave neighbors reason to meet annually in Spring and work together to maintain what was common to them. We should do the same with Mexico and South and Central America, by erecting the wall and insuring it has monitored gates through which well intentioned and invited neighbors may pass through.

Rhinehold, to live in fear of any change as doomsday because imperfect people failed good intentions in the past, is a very heavy burden to carry in life. Give hope a chance for a change, and work to make that hope a reality.

You should follow your own advice, David. You know, like opposing real change that will also retain our liberty just because something you see as similar didn’t work in the past.

I am all for change. I am not for changing by taking away more liberty. That’s not change, that’s more of the same. If you want to vote for Osame this year, that’s your decision, but if you think you are going to see improvement, I just hope you are good at accepting disappointment.

Especially considering the topic you hold dear to your heart. You know there is now way an Obama administration is going to do anything meaningful with illegal immigration, other than what Clinton did, award amnesty. And we know how well that worked.

BTW, not Clinton, Reagan… Well, same difference really, if you want to get down to it.

Excerpt from Yahoo/AFP
“MERIDA, Mexico (AFP) - Twelve decapitated bodies bearing signs of torture were found Thursday in eastern Mexico, authorities said, adding that they were still looking for the heads.”

Maybe this will be the factor that encourages the fence to get built post haste. But, I doubt it.

Rhinehold, be Feb. 09 the duopoly will give er anuther big push for amnesty.

No, if the exising facts aren’t enough to sway Amnesty supporters, that one isn’t going to change their minds unfortunately. :/

DRRemer, not being in Texas, it doesn’t matter to me how they got here, or whether they are legal or not. They’re here, and are being treated for TB here, in the real world. You are claiming they are being screened for TB and I am telling you that I have to be tested for TB for my work, and that I know they are being treated for TB here. Did they get the TB from us?

I guess Frost’s irony was wasted on you.

ohrealy said: “They’re here, and are being treated for TB here, in the real world.”

No, their children may be when tested upon entering schools, but, their many of their other relatives avoid US authorities like the plague. And are not tested, nor treated until long after they have the potential to be communicable with their disease.

Use a bit of CDC logic here. They shop, and interact with the public after crossing over our border, some with TB, spreading TB for months or even years before becoming ill enough to require hospitalization and quarantine. And there are other diseases too like Hepatitus B which a person can carry and spread for many years before being detected.

The whole trick to managing communicable disease is to innoculate and prevent its spread, not treat people AFTER they have spread the disease for weeks, months, or even years in the population. A significant number (but unknown percentage - part of the problem) of illegal aliens from Central American countries are not innoculated, and account for the dramatic rise in Hepatitus B in Texas communities. In Texas we require testing of school kid’s innoculations before they can enter our schools, but, with identity theft and forgeries becoming an industry, those forged records constitute a real public threat to American citizens.

The rise of Hepatitus B outbreaks, and other equatorial diseases along border states speaks to the fact that our system public health and disease control is failing in the wake of illegal immigration to prevent this rise in communicable disease outbreaks. My daughter’s school has issued 3 such warnings in the last 5 years. We received only one in all her years in school prior to that. It is a very real problem and risk.

David,

I was simply offering another perspective that has been in my brain since elementary school about walls and good neighbors.

You are correct it is art, not economics. Politics is often guided by the heart, however.